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Tuesday, September 6, 2011

The Unforeseen Risks Of Palestinian Statehood

Any Palestinian state would have an obviously injurious impact on
U.S. strategic interests, as well as on Israel's sheer physical survival. After
Palestine, Israel would require greater self-reliance in all existential
military matters.

By Louis Rene Beres

Very
soon, in mid-September, Palestinian Authority leaders will seek statehood at
the United Nations. There, the basic strategy will be to secure a presumably
authoritative acceptance of Palestinian sovereignty. In essence, as this plan
to circumvent both the original Oslo Agreements and the more recent "Road
Map" would not succeed in the Security Council, where the United States
has veto power, the PA will quickly bring the sensitive matter before the
larger and more sympathetic General Assembly.

Legally,
this strategy would mock all codified expectations of the governing treaty on
statehood, the Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (1934). But the
main danger for Israel would lie latent in Palestinian statehood itself. Once
accepted by the UN, whether lawfully or unlawfully, a Palestinian state would
increase the risks of both mass-destruction terrorism and regional nuclear war.
These generally unforeseen risks of Palestinian statehood could ultimately
dwarf the more routinely expressed fear that "Palestine" would
systematically displace Israel in "stages."

A
Palestinian state would itself be non-nuclear. This incontestable fact is
unrelated to the expanded post-Palestine nuclear threat to Israel. Concerning
this threat, what only matters is that after Palestine, the resultant
correlation of armed forces in the region would be cumulatively less favorable
to Israel, something that could lower the general threshold of resort to
nuclear weapons.

Any
new state of Palestine would be carved out of the still-living body of Israel.
Promptly, this 23rd Arab state would embark upon territorial extension,
occasionally, in unopposed and audacious increments, well-beyond its
UN-constituted borders, and deep into the now-porous boundaries of Israel proper.

At
that point, despite the obvious new Arab aggression, the "international
community" would almost certainly look away. By then, after all, Israel
will already be widely regarded as an alien presence in the otherwise neatly
homogeneous Dar al Islam, the Middle Eastern "world of Islam."

Any
Palestinian state would have an obviously injurious impact on U.S. strategic
interests, as well as on Israel's sheer physical survival. After Palestine,
Israel would require greater self-reliance in all existential military matters.

In
turn, such self-reliance would demand: (1) a more comprehensive and explicit
nuclear strategy involving refined deterrence, preemption and war fighting
capabilities; and (2) a corresponding and thoroughly updated conventional war
strategy.

The
birth of Palestine could affect these two interpenetrating strategies in
several important ways. Immediately, it would enlarge Israel's need for what
military strategists call "escalation dominance" - namely, the
capacity to fully determine sequential moves toward greater destructiveness. By
definition, as any Palestinian state would make Israel's conventional
capabilities far more complex and problematic, the Israel Defense Forces'
national command authority would now need to make the country's still-implicit
nuclear deterrent less ambiguous.

Taking
the presumed Israeli Bomb out of the "basement," could enhance
Israel's overall security for a while; but over time, ending "deliberate
ambiguity" could also heighten the chances of nuclear weapons use.

With
a Palestinian state in place, a nuclear war could arrive in Israel not only as
a "bolt-from-the-blue" surprise missile attack, but also as a result,
intended or inadvertent, of escalation. If an enemy state were to begin with
"only" conventional and/or biological attacks upon Israel, Jerusalem
might respond, sooner or later, with fully nuclear reprisals. Alternately, if
this enemy state were to begin with solely conventional attacks upon Israel,
Jerusalem's conventional reprisals might still be met, in the uncertain
strategic future, with enemy nuclear counterstrikes.

It
follows that a genuinely persuasive Israeli conventional deterrent, at least to
the extent that it would prevent enemy-state conventional and/or biological
attacks in the first place, could significantly reduce Israel's eventual risk
of an escalatory exposure to nuclear war.

Why
should Israel need a conventional deterrent at all? Even after Palestinian
statehood, wouldn't rational enemies desist from launching conventional and/or
biological attacks upon Israel for well-founded fears of an Israeli nuclear
retaliation? Not necessarily. Aware that Israel would cross the nuclear
threshold only in extraordinary circumstances, these enemy states could be
convinced, rightly or wrongly, that as long as their own attacks remained
non-nuclear, Israel would respond "proportionately," in kind.

The
only credible way for Israel to deter large-scale conventional attacks after
any UN creation of Palestine would be by maintaining visible and large-scale
conventional capabilities. Naturally, those enemy states contemplating
first-strike attacks on Israel using chemical and/or biological weapons would
be apt to take more seriously Israel's nuclear deterrent. Whether or not this
nuclear deterrent had remained undisclosed or "ambiguous" could
seriously affect Israel's credibility, as could perceptions of Israel's
corollary capabilities for anti-missile defense and cyber-warfare.

A
continually upgraded conventional capability is needed by Israel to deter or to
preempt conventional attacks, enemy aggressions that could lead, via
escalation, to assorted forms of unconventional war. Here, Palestine's presence
would critically impair Israel's strategic depth, and thereby its capacity to
wage conventional warfare.

Finally,
both the United States and Israel should assume that recent and ongoing
revolutionary events in Libya and Syria will enlarge the theft and black-market
trafficking of chemical and biological weapons stocks in the region. Depending
upon where these dangerous materials would wind up, in the Middle East and
North Africa, or even in North America, they could exacerbate the
already-expected harms of any UN-declared state of Palestine.

-This commentary was published in HAARETZ on 06/09/2011
-Louis Rene Beres is an expert on Israeli security matters and the author of 10
major books and several hundred journal articles on international relations and
international law

About Me

I graduated from the French University in Beirut (St Joseph) specialising in Political and Economic Sciences. I started my working life in 1973 as a reporter and journalist for the pan-Arab magazine “Al-Hawadess” in Lebanon later becoming its Washington, D.C. correspondent. I subsequently moved to London in 1979 joining “Al-Majallah” magazine as its Deputy Managing Editor. In 1984 joined “Assayad” magazine in London initially as its Managing Editor and later as Editor-in-Chief. Following this, in 1990 I joined “Al-Wasat” magazine (part of the Dar-Al-Hayat Group) in London as a Managing Editor. In 2011 I became the Editor-In-Chief of Miraat el-Khaleej (Gulf Mirror). In July 2012 I became the Chairman of The Board of Asswak Al-Arab Publishing Ltd in UK and the Editor In Chief of its first Publication "Asswak Al-Arab" Magazine (Arab Markets Magazine) (www.asswak-alarab.com).

I have already authored five books. The first “The Tears of the Horizon” is a love story. The second “The Winter of Discontent in The Gulf” (1991) focuses on the first Gulf war sparked by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. His third book is entitled “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: From Balfour Promise to Bush Declaration: The Complications and the Road to a Lasting Peace” (March 2008). The fourth book is titled “How Iran Plans to Fight America and Dominate the Middle East” (October 2008) And the fifth and the most recent is titled "JIHAD'S NEW HEARTLANDS: Why The West Has Failed To Contain Islamic Fundamentalism" (May 2011).

Furthermore, I wrote the memoirs of national security advisor to US President Ronald Reagan, Mr Robert McFarlane, serializing them in “Al-Wasat” magazine over 14 episodes in 1992.

Over the years, I have interviewed and met several world leaders such as American President Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Margaret Thacher, Late King Hassan II of Morocco, Late King Hussein of Jordan,Tunisian President Zein El-Abedine Bin Ali, Lybian Leader Moammar Al-Quadhafi,President Amine Gemayel of Lebanon,late Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, Late Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat, Haitian President Jean Claude Duvalier, Late United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan,Algerian President Shazli Bin Jdid, Jamaican Prime Minister Edward Siyagha and more...